The Rift Beta Tweet

In what really should be a tweet, I present to you my feelings on the upcoming Rift MMO. I would really like to experience more, but need a VIP key to do so (hint hint to Trion). Without further ado:

Rift MMO feels like a polished Warhammer Online with more dynamic public quests. I am going to get it.

Okay, I will shortly expand, but for a better impressions check out Syp’s. First off, the graphics, engine, and art style feel very Warhammer Online like. This is not a bad thing. In fact the game looks pretty good all around. There are a few issues like global cooldown and quest ganking, which is being looked at with a hard eye… but the dynamic content is the centerpiece for Rift.

Sadly, I did not experience enough of it to lay down The Wørd, but the little that I saw disappointed me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t because of the Rift system itself, which is quite awesome. It’s the old world mob tagging and grouping systems that seem to undercut this new world dynamic content.

Why do I have to be grouped to share in kills? Why is grouping not as easy as Warhammer Online? Why do I have to be grouped to even be able to participate in most of the dynamic content? I believe these questions need a hard lookin’ at by Trion because I feel if they kowtow to the old ways too much it’s going to put some tarnish on their shiny.

Everything new and fun is fun for a while. How long it stays fun is up to the individual. Rifts do not seem to be something I would enjoy for more than a few months unless there is some big dynamic changes that make you change tactics and be more on your toes.

/agree, but I was talking about the whole ‘not noticing the rewards’ thing. That only happens in beta for most people. So if the content is fun + the rewards are good, great. If the content is fun but the rewards are poor, ghost town. If the content is bla but the rewards are good, grind.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Rift when it goes live. We saw how it played out for WAR and PQs.

Well to be fair there are rewards, I just did not notice them. They seemed to be good when I did finally look. I did not notice because they automatically give you loot, you don’t have to open a chest or anything. If you were there you get loot. Nice system.

Right. When the rifts are closed I assumed we would get something but I never saw a chest or anything. Until later on when I got the message that my rift loot bag is getting full. I finally figured that out and spent the next 15 minutes looking at my huge pile of stuff.

Since I just finished watching my husband play Warhammer and miss out on a PQ chest (for which he rolled 1st place) after dying and running back a moment too late to collect, the “automatic” loot drops in Rift are one of those, to quote Paul Barnett, genius tests.

As far as I can tell being in a group has next to no impact for rifting besides the fact that it’s easier to get heals when the healer can see your life bar. I was also able to get top 3 contribution on most every rift I participated in as a melee class (Champion).

Its true… mob tagging, especially with a proliferation of quick-necessity grouping, is a thing that needs to change. I feel bad enough now when I kill a mob that was inadvertantly somebody elses… if the loot of that mob could be split between the active participants without the effort of inviting/waiting for approval, then grouping would both simultaneously happen all the time and less of the time and both would work much better.

Just posted a long reply over on SynCaine’s site so I will just say that I had a great time in both betas and will definitely be buying Rift.

I did plenty of Rifts both solo, grouped and in raid groups and I can’t say I saw any significant difference in the way rewards were handed out. I felt you could join in solo just as easily as you can in War’s PQs.

@Julian The general quality of the quest narrative and dialog is good for the genre, meaning somewhere below average genre-novel or comic-book level. Not as witty as some of the better EQ2 quests, for example, but more than acceptable.

There have been a fair few complaints that the questing is generic in terms of plot and that’s probably fair comment. I personally strongly like “Kill Ten Rats” quests and “FedEx” quests, and Rift has it’s share of those. There is a deal more originality than that, however. The quest with the dwarf who’s trying to protect his cousin from potentially fatal hazing in the college in Silverwood was reasonably inventive and atypical, I thought.

I had some problems with tone, particularly in some of the quests in the Guardian areas. I found one sequence there sufficiently offensive that I bug-reported it, and in general I found the Guardians difficult to take as the “noble” side.

I felt that Telara is actually split between two totalitarian states, either of which could qualify as “evil” under a modern sensibility, and neither of which could be reasonably described as “good”. I’m not convinced that is intentional, more likely due to to some innapropriate writing in the Guardian quest and flavor text.

The background lore I found largely incomprehensible, but I find almost all MMO background lore to be drivel so I don’t try very hard to make sense of it. There is a lot of the usual flowery, overwritten, overblown stuff but that comes with the territory and Rift is certainly no worse than most other MMOs in that respect.

One part I was particularly impressed by was the incidental dialog between NPCs. I spent a good deal of time just standing near NPCs listening to them interact. I probably learned more of the lore/background from that than I did from the questing.